Principles of Information Processing and Natural Learning in Biological Systems

Predrag Slijepcevic

doi:10.1007/s10838-019-09471-9

Abstract

The key assumption behind evolutionary epistemology is that animals are active learners or ‘knowers’. In the present study, I updated the concept of natural learning, developed by Henry Plotkin and John Odling-Smee, by expanding it from the animal-only territory to the biosphere-as-a-whole territory. In the new interpretation of natural learning the concept of biological information, guided by Peter Corning’s concept of “control information”, becomes the ‘glue’ holding the organism–environment interactions together. The control information guides biological systems, from bacteria to ecosystems, in the process of natural learning executed by the universal algorithm. This algorithm, summarized by the acronym IGPT (information-gain-process-translate) incorporates natural cognitive methods including sensing/perception, memory, communication, and decision-making. Finally, the biosphere becomes the distributed network of communicative interactions between biological systems termed the interactome. The concept of interactome is based on Gregory Bateson’s natural epistemology known as the “ecology of mind”. Mimicking Bateson’s approach, the interactome may also be designated “physiology of mind”—the principle behind regulating the biosphere homeostasis.

Highlights

The universal capacity of organisms, from bacteria to animals, to actively sense their local environments and adjust to them intelligently, reflects the universal capacity to learn (Plotkin 1982; Bradie 1986; Gontier 2006; Watson et al 2015; Watson and Szathmáry 2016; Bradie and Harms 2017)
Learning enables organisms to intelligently adjust to local environments and calls for further learning and further adjustments—organisms are engaged in an endless process of natural epistemology or biological intelligence (Slijepcevic 2018)
The update consisted of integrating the concept of control information and expanding the territory of evolutionary epistemology from the animal-only territory to the biosphere-as-a-whole territory based on recent advances in bacterial and plant cognition

Summary

Introduction

The universal capacity of organisms, from bacteria to animals, to actively sense their local environments and adjust to them intelligently, reflects the universal capacity to learn (Plotkin 1982; Bradie 1986; Gontier 2006; Watson et al 2015; Watson and Szathmáry 2016; Bradie and Harms 2017). Learning enables organisms to intelligently adjust to local environments and calls for further learning and further adjustments—organisms are engaged in an endless process of natural epistemology or biological intelligence (Slijepcevic 2018). Local environments, represented by diverse groups of organisms, learn about adjusting actions of their organismal partners and intelligently adjust to their partners’ adjustments. This is the biosphere-wide cybernetic process that includes all species and all organisms (Bateson 1979). Organisms from different species communicate through the process of cross-kingdom communication based on biosemiotics (McFall-Ngai et al 2013; Jarosz et al 2014)

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion